Another great “Whiteboard Friday” video from Rand at SEOmoz.  This one talks about over-optimization and it covers it very well.  Check it out:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – On-Site Over Optimization from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Is this natural? Used cars, used cars for sale, buy used cars… is a post from: MickMel

It’s something that I’ve suspected, but never had the data to back up — users are typing longer search queries into Google.  As people become more comfortable with search engines, they’re learning that longer queries will help them find what they want much more easily.

There’s also the thought that searchers may be refining their queries before they click on a single result.  For example, they might search for “blue widgets”, not find what they want, then search for “blue widgets with a small handle” and then click on a result.

They key, as I’ve been saying for a while, is in those long tail searches.  But how can you optimze for searches that you aren’t even aware of?  Google says that up to 25% of all of their queries are brand new — never been searched before.  You simply need to help Google see your content as easily as possible — write solid copy, use H1 tags, title tags, internally link liberally — no new magic here.  Follow the basics and you’ll keep getting this kind of wonderful traffic.

Search queries are getting longer is a post from: MickMel

A new tool has been added to your arsenal to help fight against duplicate content on your site, and Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are all on board with it.  Introducing the “Canonical Tag”.

This new tag allows you to specify the desired URL for a page that might have multiple URLS.  For example, you might have:

• http://www.example.com/products/widget/
• http://www.example.com/product.php?product=widget
• http://www.example.com/product.php?product=widget&id=3321

All of those are the same page, but which one should the search engines index?  You can use the <link> tag in the header of the page to make it clear.

In this case, you’d probably add:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/products/widget/” />

The link will be treated much like a 301 redirect, though you can’t link to pages on another domain.

More information about this can be found at Search Engine Land, or you can read the official announcements from Google or Yahoo.

All on board for the new "Canonical Tag" for you to use is a post from: MickMel

Google has just released a handy tool to the webmaster portal that shows you all of your 404 errors with a link of pages that link to them.

As Matt Cutts explains, it’s an easy way to get some links to your site.  There are probably sites out there that meant to link to you, but messed up a character, or put an extra letter on the end or something, resulting in a 404 error (and no link juice).  By noticing that error and contacting the linking site, that link will become beneficial.

You could also just create a 301 redirect from the broken URL to whatever page they intended to link to.  The advantage to this is that you wouldn’t have to wait (and hope) for the other site to fix their link.  The downside is that it could become cumbersome to manage if you have a lot of them.

In any case, there is a lot of usefulness to be found with this tool.  I’ve been digging through my sites and finding some jems, so give it a shot!

Get more links by fixing erroneous links to your site is a post from: MickMel

Now this is pretty cool.  You can search the web as it existed back in January, 2001 using this nifty page that Google created.

It’s only going to last for a month, so go play with it.  There’s certainly no SEO value in using it, but it’s kind of neat to play with it and see what was first for various terms.

Search the web as it was in 2001 is a post from: MickMel

It’s been in Google Labs for a couple years, but Google Suggest is finally coming to the main search box on Google.com.

Google Suggest shows an on-the-fly drop-down of possible search results as you’re typing.  The advantages of this, as presented by Google, are:

• Help formulate queries. Start typing what you want to find, and it’ll offer suggestions on how to finish your query.
• Reduce typos. The results that pop up are already spell corrected, with the same logic as they use in the “Did you mean?” feature.
• Save keystrokes. You don’t need to type the whole query.  Start typing until your desired query appears, then just choose the proper option to finish it.

You probably won’t see this on your Google homepage yet, but it’ll be rolling out to all users sometime this week.

Google Suggest finally coming to the main Google homepage is a post from: MickMel

What happens when you search Google for [your name]?  Do you like what you see?

Part of that depends on your name.  If your name is common (Joe Smith) or owned by a celebrity (if your name is Michael Phelps and you’re not a swimmer, good luck) you might be in trouble.  For the rest of us, there are some things you can do to help.

Ed Kohler has just written an excellent post on the best ways to control the results that come up for your name.  In a nutshell, you need to create accounts using your name on popular sites, then get them to rank near the top.  In Ed’s case, he owns all of the top 10 results and 89 of the first 100.  I own all 10 for my name, and 49 of the first 50.

So how do you do it?  Between Ed and myself, our top 10 consist of pages such as:

• Personal site/blog
• Squidoo page
• LinkedIn profile
• Staff page at work
• FriendFeed profile
• Twitter profile
• Facebook profile
• Digg profile
• Flickr pages
• Amazon profile
• Various other sites

The vast majority of those are sites that you can register for in under a minute.  The more you can contribute to each site, the better.  For example, if you have a lot of followers on Twitter, then you have a lot more links pointing to your profile (from your followers), thus raising your ranking for that profile.

However, even if you don’t have time to build each profile out, at least get registered, get your name reserved, and try to get back to it eventually.  Building up your search results will take some time, so do it now while it’s not a big deal, and it’ll be ready for you if you ever need it (job hunt, etc).

Make sure you own your name in Google is a post from: MickMel

When Cuil launched a few days ago, one of the features they promoted is that they don’t store ANY info about searches performed on the site.  Now Google has shot back by making their “customized results” a bit more transparent.

When you search, you might start to see a box in the top right corner that says something like “Customized for…”.  Personally, I haven’t seen one yet so I’ll just have to show you the example photo they posted on the Official Google Blog:

They say the results are based on a few factors:

• Location: Using your IP address
• Recent searches: Not historical searches, but when you search one thing after another.
• Web History: If you’re signed in and you’ve enabled web history, it might use some of that data.

They make it clear that the results aren’t new — just more transparent.  Good move, I think.

Google takes a shot at Cuil — shows how they customize results is a post from: MickMel

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) has just launched today, and looks like it might be the first search engine in a while to give Google some competition.  The main thing Cuil promotes is the size of it’s index — 120 billion pages, compared to the estimated 40 billion pages in Google’s index.

However, we’re not sure what to make of the “larger” index.  For almost any search query, Google returns more results.  If Cuil had a bigger index, wouldn’t it have more results for common words?  For example, a search for “horse” on Cuil produces 128,400,000 results, while the same query on Google produces 322,000,000 results.

Cuil also seems to be having some issues with multi-word queries, but I’m sure those bugs will work themselves out.  As TechCrunch said, “Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.”

Formidable Google competitor launches — Cuil is a post from: MickMel

TechCrunch has just hinted at a major search engine announcement next week.  In this post, we read the following:

Google also says “But we’re proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine.”

That may be true today, but it probably won’t be true next week (check back here then). Google knows that as well as we do, and that’s why they posted this today.

Big news from Microsoft?  Yahoo?  Someone else?  What do you think it might be?

Big search engine news coming next week? is a post from: MickMel